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The historian Allan Nevins characterized the American war against Japan as follows:

"Probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese...Emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened by the ferocities of Japanese commanders."

The US government and media adopted an exterminationist policy towards the Japanese which called for the total destruction, annihilation, and extermination of the Japanese people and nation. John Toland, in Infamy, maintained that the war against Japan was "a war that need not have been fought...fought because of...American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance of the orient, rigidity, self-righteousness, honor, national pride and fear." The methodology and tactics used by the US to defeat the Japanese were in part based on the patterns of the "Indian wars" and on a Manichaean total war between good and evil, between us and them. In a poll conducted in December, l944, Americans were asked, "What do you think we should do with Japan as a country after the war?" 13% of the respondents wanted to "kill all Japanese", while 33% supported destroying Japan as a political entity.

The first step in defeating the Japanese was to dehumanize them as a people and to depict them in archetypical racist terms as inferior, subhuman, apes, "savages", and "barbarians". Standard archetypes or exemplars or avatars of propaganda were utilized to dehumanize and stereotype the enemy. These archetypes of propaganda reappear in all propaganda campaigns and all wars. This was precisely how Native American Indians were defeated and how blacks were enslaved and excluded. The Japanese were denoted as animals, reptiles, insects, as "yellow monkeys", baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice, rats, vipers, rattlesnakes, cockroaches, and vermin. Depicting the enemy as an animal lessens the amount of guilt when the enemy is killed. In Nazi Germany, for instance, Jews were depicted as lice or rats to expedite mass extermination. Franz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka concentration camp explained that dehumanization was necessary to expedite the extermination process:

To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.

The enemy was subhuman, or lesser than human, or not human, and thus deserved or warranted extermination. Killing such an enemy is proper and appropriate and those doing the killing should feel no guilt or moral compunction. The Japanese were "mad dogs" or "yellow dogs", and as reflected in a statement during the war, "mad dogs are just insane animals that should be shot."

A manifestation of racism and racist hysteria was to refer to the Japanese in racist stereotypical terms: "Nip", from Nippon, the Japanese word for Japan, and the shortened "Jap". These were the equivalent of "nigger" and "gook" and "Hun". New terms were also coined by US Marines: "Japes", a combination of "Japs" and "Apes". Another neologism was "monkeynips". US Marine Eugene B. Sledge recalled that native peoples of the Pacific were referred to as "gooks". The major themes were of hunting and then exterminating vermin, or predatory animals, "a nameless mass of vermin". Guadalcanal was described as "a hunter's paradise...teeming with monkey-men."

J. Glenn Gray described how American troops hunted down a Japanese soldier and killed him as if he were not a human being, but an animal, a beast of prey:

"When a Japanese soldier was "flushed" from his hiding place...the unit...was resting and joking. But they seized their rifles and began using him as a live target while he dashed frantically around the clearing in search of safety. The soldiers found his movements uproariously funny. Finally...they succeeded in killing him...The veteran emphasized the similarity of the enemy soldier to an animal. None of the American soldiers apparently ever considered that he may have had human feelings of fear and the wish to be spared."